You Can Herd Cats; Global Eye; Training Wheels; Myth of the Model; these articles have their titles and text in this color and are featured this week in -
 
Ender's Review of the Web
 

Web articles of likely interest to individualists found during the week of May 16 - 22, 2004.

 
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Political Liberty
Articles showing a positive influence of political action on the cause of Liberty.
 
Unmitigated Gall 
        by Ron Beatty from The Libertarian Enterprise
"I think that in this election year, for the first time, we actually have a chance to make a significant difference. If we can motivate even 5 to 10 per cent of the voters to actually vote libertarian, we will send shock waves through the political landscape that will resonate for years to come."
 
Who Needs the NYSE?
        by Stephen Moore from Cato Institute
"This week Mr. Baker took on [a] sacred cow: the New York Stock Exchange. On Tuesday, Mr. Baker held a hearing on whether the New York Stock Exchange is really necessary anymore. That's a good question to ask in this new information age economy...."
 
Why an Underdog May be the Best Antidote to the Neo-Cons
        by Bill Kauffman from CounterPunch
"Nader, unbeholden to the media monopolists who beam witless smut and moronic celebrity-worship into the homes of compliant Americans, attacks the corporate media as 'subversive of family values, parental discipline and wholesome childhoods'. He's the only candidate in the race with the guts and the sense to tell Americans to turn off the damned idiot box."
 
Life in Amerika
Articles depicting the negative impact of politics on Liberty.
 
Atlanta's Segregated Schools -- in 2004
        by Eric Wearne from Cato Institute
"But this is not simply the story of a racist South finally coming to grips with what enlightened Northerners knew all along. Post-Brown, many places in the South actually achieved higher rates of desegregation than were seen in many cities and states in the North."

Court-ordered sexism

        by Robyn E. Blumner from St. Petersburg Times
"Yet due to a series of unwritten and unspoken gender-related assumptions, family judges tend to give mothers both decisional control over the children and financial support after a family breakup. This gives women an incentive to dissolve their relationships, as demonstrated by the fact that women initiate divorce in about 70 percent of cases."
 
Tabloid America: Myth-Making, Mythology and Sensationalism
        by Douglas Herman from Strike The Root
"Modern myth-making, the creating of demons and monsters and heroes, is a full time job in any state propaganda machine, and ours is no different. But then, so too is the exploding of myths and slaying of monsters and demons."
 
Ordered Liberty without the State
Some people say it's Anarchy, some say it's not possible. It is an interesting topic.
 
Abu Ghraib and the Nature of the State
        by Gene Callahan from LewRockwell.com
"But the fact that the behavior of some slave owners or mob bosses is less onerous than that of others does not obviate the immoral nature of slavery and protection rackets. Nor can any state justify its existence or its actions by noting that the some other state is even more despicable than it is."
 
The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories
        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"But as long as we have the out-in-the-open conspiracy known as the modern state - the ubiquitous root of massive theft, deception, and war - focusing too much on any one lesser-exposed conspiracy theory amounts to searching for hidden branches at which to hack."
 
We Need the State… Otherwise, Something Bad Might Happen!
        by Gene Callahan from LewRockwell.com
"[D]o away with government ... and we'll have a world where people fly airplanes into skyscrapers, bring down large buildings with car bombs, and strap explosives to their bodies, then blow themselves up on a bus, killing scores of innocent passengers. ... I guess we'd really better keep government around, so we can live in a nice, safe world where none of those things ever happen."
 
Spreading Decentralism
Articles demonstrating an increase in the dispersal of power.
 
Think the Unthinkable: Partition Iraq
        by Ivan Eland from The Independent Institute 
"So what can the United States do to dampen the insurgency and avoid a potential civil war? Something that the Bush administration and the Washington foreign policy establishment have avoided like the plague: rapid U.S. troop withdrawal and genuine and complete self-determination for Iraqis."
 
Gulching: Yes, You Really Can Herd Cats
        by Claire Wolfe from Backwoods Home Magazine
"'But the good thing is,' I say, getting it, 'all these people are doing what they want. And at most they've found five or six or 10 other families who like the same places they like'."
 
Interview with Mike Hoy
        from Loompanics Unlimited
"Attempts to control access to information, no matter who does it, are anti-life. My theory is, that the urge to censor is based on fear -- fear of the human mind. What possible reason is there to forbid anyone to read a book?"
 
The New World Hegemon
Depictions of the coming Imperial power
 
Democracy By Fiat
        by Butler Shaffer from LewRockwell.com
"One of the unintended consequences of the effort to establish democracy by fiat may be to reveal, to Americans, the chimerical nature of their own system. Perhaps more of our neighbors will ... begin to look behind the façade of the supposedly democratic processes under which they live, and discover the real sovereign powers who put their puppets in place...."
 
Global Eye
        by Chris Floyd from The Moscow Times
"For despite all the grandiose political rhetoric and world-historical perturbations emanating from the Bush Regime's imperial project, we should never lose sight of one simple fact: Deep down, these guys are nothing but cheap hoods, two-bit chiselers hustling for loot, thug-brained goons with no more grandeur about them than the meanest pack of Mafia knee-breakers."
 
Things fall apart - Part three of three
        by David T. Wright from The Last Ditch
"It seems clear that the imprisonment and torture of random Iraqis has nothing to do with their supposed guilt or innocence. The whole point of brutalizing them is simply to get information. As Michael Corleone would say, it's not personal, only business."
 
Politics by Other Means
War, rumors of war, and politicians fomenting war.
 
Pendulum Pundits
        by Michael Young from Reason
"The shortcoming of the pro-war crowd in Washington is that in their zeal to topple Saddam Hussein, they never read up on the world they were entering into-particularly the ways of the Arab market, or souq. One doesn't have to like or be liked in the souq, but one must stand up for his end and avoid retiring when there is still room for compromise."
 
Seeking Silver Linings
        by Alan Bock from Antiwar.com
"Novak notes in the column that 'conventional wisdom portrays the latest Zogby Poll's 81 percent of Republican voters committed to Bush as reflecting extraordinary loyalty to the president by the GOP base. Actually, when nearly one out of five Republicans cannot flatly say they support Bush, that could spell defeat in a closely contested election'."
 
The Empire Strikes Out
        by Mark Hand from LewRockwell.com
"Nimmo takes occasional jabs at Bush administration economic, environmental and social policies, but not so much so that his book would alienate libertarian or conservative readers who otherwise should be able to find common ground on which to stand with Nimmo regarding the perils of endless wars against bogus enemies around the world and here at home."
 
Spontaneous Order
Articles showing decentralized successes.
 
Nicholas Oresme and the First Monetary Treatise
        by Jörg Guido Hülsmann from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"The practical offshoot of the Austrian theory of money is that the production of money should best be left to the free market. Government interventionism does not improve monetary exchanges; it merely enriches a select few at the expense of all other money users."
 
Putting Organ Donors First 
        by David J. Undis from Frontiers of Freedom
"LifeSharers is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization staffed by unpaid volunteers. Members agree to donate their organs when they die. Furthermore, they agree to offer their organs first to fellow members, if any member is a suitable match, before offering them to others."
 
Triumph of the Masses
        by Lance Morrow from Time
"Surowiecki's thesis posits an uncanny and generally unconscious collective intelligence working not by top-down diktat but rather in dynamic arrangements of what the economist Friedrich Hayek called 'spontaneous order.' ... Forget about the road less taken. Running with the pack could be the smartest way to get ahead."
 
Nonspontaneous Disorder
Articles showing centrally planned disasters.
 
The USDA and Cow Disease Madness
        by Anthony Gregory from The Independent Institute
"If America had a true free market in beef testing, standards may indeed rise sharply as the current levels of contamination would be considered intolerable. The USDA only serves to protect politically favored slaughterhouses over less powerful ones, such as Creekstone Farms, all while providing Americans with a false sense of security."
 
"Beyond Personal Responsibility"
        by Radley Balko from Tech Central Station 
"A society where everyone is responsible for everyone else's well-being is a society more apt to accept government restrictions, for example -- on what McDonalds can put on its menu, what Safeway or Kroger can put on grocery shelves, or holding food companies responsible for the bad habits of unhealthy consumers."
 
And the Regulators Propose: Regulations
        by Gregory Bresiger from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"I am arguing that people should be responsible enough to accept the consequences of their actions. I am arguing that, in a market economy that lives up to its name, there must always be a certain degree of failure. I am arguing that the regulators are depending on Americans having no sense of history."
 
War Is The Health Of The State
War is the ultimate State intervention in society.
 
Training Wheels and Fighting Words
        by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. from LewRockwell.com
"They, along with many of us, had clearly been feeling frustration that the conventional media are not telling the full story, and worried that we have been living through something approximating a fascist takeover of the United States, and yet we have all been too silent."
 
The Greatest Tragedy
        by Anthony Gregory from Strike The Root
"The state is also the health of war. ... It's no coincidence that such champions of an active federal government, profoundly intrusive and involved in our lives domestically--Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson to name a few--are the same men who have dragged America into war. Those who thirst for power rarely distinguish between intervention at home and intervention abroad."  
 
The Most Dreaded Enemy of Liberty
        by James Madison from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." This older article was promoted this week by FFF. It has never been more relevant.
 
Bits of History
The Past seen with a fresh look.
 
The Source of Evil
        by Jim Davies from Strike The Root
"Sadly, it's only too plain that the Declarers of American Independence had no thought to create a society free of the menace of governments and their laws .... Theirs was not a rebellion against power, just a rebellion against someone else's power."
 
In praise of V-8s
        by Marc Cooper from L.A. Weekly
"Notions of freedom raged in pandemic proportions. Some young Americans found its expression in Freedom Summer or in weed, mescaline and the Beatles. Others, in the Beach Boys and high-octane machines and drive-ins. Some tried it all. The success of the GTO (Ronnie & the Daytonas' "Little GTO" single sold a million copies) set off a furious muscle-car competition in Detroit."
 
'Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix'
        by Zora Neale Hurston from LewRockwell.com
"Growth from within. Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association."
 
War and Peace
Articles showing the nature of War.
 
From Japan: A View of Insanity
        by Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers from LewRockwell.com
"How could the Atomic bombing and murder of 200,000 people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki not be called a 'War crime'? How about the fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed 140,000 civilians in one night? ... Perhaps someday the history books will call these crimes what they really were: Genocide. ... And now America grapples with the stark reality of 'war crimes'...."
 
Phony Disengagement, Secret Escalation
        by Paul Sperry from Antiwar.com
"While the Pentagon says it plans to scale back the U.S. occupation in Iraq, it's quietly doing just the opposite, high-level internal e-mails reveal. It has launched a massive nationwide call-up of former service members across the country who have not fully completed their eight-year contractual obligation to the US Army."
 
'Cover Your Ass'
        by Douglas Herman from Strike The Root
"No way in hell are you young guys defending my freedoms by smashing down doors and brutalizing civilians in an occupied country. I don't care if all the blowhard conjobs in the Pentagon call your duty in Iraq 'liberation' or the Second Coming; the plain, unvarnished truth is you are prison guards in a vast, poisoned, outdoor penitentiary."
 
Great Individuals In History
Some people stand out from the crowd.
 
Philosopher - John Stuart Mill : May 20, 1806
        by Richard M. Ebeling from The Future of Freedom Foundation
Professor Ebeling's essay on Mill's great work "On Liberty" is the main selection here, but there is a biography available too and the Classics section at Endervidualism now links to "On Liberty."
 
Painter - Mary Cassatt : May 22, 1844
        by Nicolas Pioch from WebMuseum
"Despite her admiration for Degas, she was no slavish imitator of his style, retaining her own very personal idiom throughout her career. From him, and other Impressionists, she acquired an interest in the rehabilitation of the pictural qualities of everyday life, inclining towards the domestic and the intimate rather than the social and the urban..., with a special emphasis on the mother and child theme in the 1890s."
 
Scientist - Andrei Sakharov : May 21, 1921
        by Fang Lizhi from Time
"And Sakharov might remind the West too that freedom is fragile, that if democratic societies are not protective of their liberties, even they may lose it."
 
Culcha'
Books, Movies, TV, Media, Music, poetry, etc.
 
A Trip Down Anarchy Lane
        by Bob Jackson from Strike The Root
"In light of Andrew, I revised my criticism of 'Lucifer's Hammer.' Now when I consider the story, I realize that the principal characters, in the wake of catastrophic disaster, formed a private property order that would delight an Austrian economist. ... They let in the people they want. They bar the people they don't want."
 
The Charge of the Coalition Forces
        by Thomas Gale Moore from Antiwar.com
"Adapted, with apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson-
Half a mile, half a mile, Half a mile onward, All in the desert of Death Rode the 200 thousand. "
 
Switch and Bait
        by Jesse Walker from The American Spectator
"But it's most convincing when it's telling us stuff we already know: that Courtney Love is a bully, that Barbra Streisand is an airhead, that Scientology is creepy, that Hollywood liberals can be sanctimonious hypocrites. And its earnestness is a terrible bore: It's always insisting that there's more to the book than gossip, that there's a thesis here, dammit, even if it's hard to say just what that thesis is."
 
The lighter side
Humor, satire, cartoons, parodies, food, popular music and other things to amuse.
 
The Satirist - Harry Shearer is still hearing voices.
        by Paul Krassner from NewYorkPress
"In his own voice, referring to Bush's crusade to stamp out global terrorism, Shearer observes, 'It's like the war on drugs. It's a totally metaphorical war in which some people get killed. I expect the Partnership for a Terrorist Free America to start soon'."
 
Electronic Voting Machines
        from The Onion
"Computerized voting systems promise to simplify the polling process, but many Americans are worried about their accuracy. What are some of the machines'  potential problems?"
 
Bug Bane
        by Jacob Sullum from Reason
"The 17-year cicadas' only survival tactic is their vast numbers, the very thing that makes them so revolting. If you have a few cicadas in your yard, you've got wildlife; if you have hundreds of thousands, you've got a plague. This is just the sort of thing God used to punish the Egyptians, except their swarms didn't last as long."
 
Deep Thought
Scientific and scholarly studies, philosophical essays, in-depth and longer articles.
 
The Myth of the Model
        by Gene Callahan from Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Since the time of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the use of mathematical models has greatly increased mankind's mastery of the physical world. While their success in describing the activities of people themselves has not been as notable, some have asserted that failure is only due to the relative youth of the social sciences and the complexity of their subject matter."
 
Poverts Love To Say No
        by Gary North from LewRockwell.com
"I have learned the hard way that success is deeply resented ... by people who proclaim their devotion to 'the free enterprise economy and the American way of life.' ... Today, the tax-funded school system has undermined the message of Christianity that envy is morally wrong. The result is a society of voting poverts who are ready and able to pull down anyone who gets ahead."
 
Small world networks key to memory
        from New Scientist
"Small-world networks are surprisingly common. Human social networks, for example, famously connect any two people on Earth - or any actor to Kevin Bacon - in six steps or less."
 
Miscellany
Articles not easily classified.
 
The Origin of Money
        by Alexander "Ace" Baker from Strike The Root
"Governments (in collusion with large Banks) around the globe have forcibly taken over and monopolized the creation of new money, and abolished the natural gold standard for the sole purpose of expanding their own power and confiscating wealth. All other 'justifications' for government money are lies based on completely discredited economic hogwash."
 
Don't Bring Slavery Back to America
        by Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com
"It's a mystery why anyone, whether a hawk or a dove, would think that a draft would compromise the war effort. It's like thinking that raising taxes would make it harder to enlarge welfare programs, or that unprotected intercourse is the most surefire way to avoid pregnancy."
 
The Drug War and Terrorism
        by Scott McPherson from The Future of Freedom Foundation
"In time, drug sales would be used to boost CIA-ISI coffers in their covert war against the Russians. Some critics have even speculated that this development closely mirrored the rise of heroin use among Pakistani youths, making the U.S. government a surrogate heroin pusher at the very time that President Reagan was calling for a renewed jihad against illegal drugs."
 
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